Research Projects

The research focuses on measuring human eating behaviour in a natural environment like the Restaurant of the Future (RoF) at Wageningen University which is a ‘living laboratory’ for unobtrusive studies of food choice and eating behaviour. The research focuses on finding an ideal combination of video camera and other environmental sensor observations.

The workflow of clinicians in a patient ward can be described as nomadic. In addition to sitting in an office or fixed location (knowledge work), clinicians also roam through the hospital while doing their work (mobile work). This work typically includes collaborations with a large number of people and usage of physical tools and computing devices that are spread over multiple locations. Clinicians roam from one location to another while interacting with both mobile and stationary tools and devices.

Within the rehabilitation of stroke patients, several assessment questionnaires exist that allow to measure the performance of the patients. These are based on rating the execution of everyday tasks in a controlled environment by a therapist which is quite subjective. However, current activity recognition research to measure this performance objectively is mostly relying on body worn sensors that are quite obtrusive. An unobtrusive measurement of the body posture with textile-integrated sensors will be the focus of this project.

This project focuses on the development of discovery algorithms such as topic models and their application in daily routine monitoring. Therefore we aim towards an improved activity recognition system based on discovery which will be evaluated in simulated environment and real-world studies.

In this project our focus is on office-related tasks. After defining the wearable EEG system requirements for such studies, we identified the most suitable one among the readily-available commercial systems. Our next steps are to check the technical feasibility of unobtrusive and continuous brain monitoring in the office-related settings and to study whether the assessment of mental workload under these settings is possible for a given person.

This projects seeks to investigate human factors such as cognition and user preferences in context awareness when applied to healthcare, wellness and assisted living. Context aware prototypes will be used alongside traditional human factors methods to perform several experiments investigating problems of interest in different physical domains and with different subject cohorts. These studies, published or presented as separate pieces of work coming together to form the body of work in the PhD thesis.